Klarinet Archive - Posting 000563.txt from 1996/02

From: "Susan E. Pontow" <FBVB@-----.BITNET>
Subj: rap music continued
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 1996 20:37:43 -0500

from Chaika, "Language: The Social Mirror"

p. 226

There appears to be no change in the kinds of insults thrown at women in rap.
Often, they graphically delineate the depths of what we could term sluthood.(8)
Ms. Jones quoting from Jackson (1974, p. 4) notes that "secual relations in the
toasts were invariably affectionless" with the female existing "as a device for
exercise and articulation of female options."
Interestingly, one ghetto speech activity has for decades centered
specifically on insulting women. This was and is such an important activity
that is has had many names over the years. Sounding, chopping, raggin,
ranking, cutting, woofing, giving s___, joning, giving S and giving J are some
of the local or older terms for the same activity: competitive insulting
between African American males (Abrahams 1974), an activity now engaged in by
white males as well. Amongst my students, the term ranking is now most common,
although many report that their parents called it sounding, and one African
American colleague says it was called crowing in her Kansas neighborhood
Changing the names of the activity so often is a way of showing how important
and up to date it is. Two more recent terms for this are dissin' and illin',
although these last two can refer to any kind of negative commentnig about a
person. In this text, the term ranking will be used, although in your locale,
it might have an alternate name.
Ranking arose from an earlier competition called "playing the dozens,"
rhymed couplets with four strong beats per long line. These beats are
boldfaced below. in my hildhood neighborhood, one heard young men being "put
in the dozens" with:

I "don't" play the "dozens", I "don't" play the "game"
But the "way" I had your "mother" is a "god" damn "shame".

This started a round of such couplets, all insulting an opponent's
mother, implying that she was promiscuous. By the early 1960s, perhaps because
both the structure and topic of the dozens proved too limiting, they had given
way to ranking, such as

Your mother's like a doorknob, a turn for everyone.
Your mother is like McDonald's, fun for all ages.

The opener "your mother" is so prevalent in these, that, in anger, a
boy could insult another by simply saying, "your mother!" When employed as a
verbal dueling, however, ranking always involved unrhymed one-line similes
followed by a "kicker". This, like the structure
----------------------------------
(8) I am very aware of the sexist meaning of slut. It is my coining, but a
coining made while being most aware that female sexual habits are judged quite
differently from male's. Ms. Jones is not responsible for his term nor for my
comparison with dozens and ranking, although, as indicated, she noted the
parallels with toasts.
-----------------------------------

p. 227

of toasts, blues, and rap songs, was an almost invariant structure that had to
be conformed to. Early rap songs, those of the mid-1980s, such as "Yvette" by
L.L. Cool Jay, showed a similar structure with a strict rhyme scheme and the
addition of a chorus (Chaika 19898, pp. 161-162). This has been largely
abandoned, and although rhyme is still utilized, it doesn't have to occur at
set intervals as before and there is no necessary length of lines. Rather,
current rap utilized series of phrases, some of which hyme, all chanted to the
strong rap beat. Instead of regular choruses, some of them repeat phrases
internally two or three times, but there seems to be no rule for his. There
are fewovert linguistic transitions between the phrases. It is up to the
hearer to make the connections. Although, on the surface, the lyrics seem to
ramble, on closer inspection it can be seen that they are subordinated to a
topic or theme. These have also changed. Instead of female relatives, we now
find topics like anger at the police, exhortations to make something of one's
life, lectures against eating swine, admonitions about AIDS, and advice about
how to deal with faithless partners.
Even ranking did not confine itself to mothers and sisters. Although
they were prime targets, actually two other general themes could be ranked on:
poverty and physical attributes of the opponent and his family. Again, these
don't seem prevalent in current rap music. Ranking often took the form of a
verbal duel between two boys. Onlooker overtly commented on the quality of
each sound, much as onlookers to the earl dialogic rapping between a man and a
woman commented "talk dat talk" or "rap city baby." The more original the
ranking, the higher it was graded. As with the white repartee mentioned
earlier, ranking that elaborates on an opponent's previous statement was
considered better than an unrelated one. For street kids, ranking and other
verbal displays were--and are-often major determinants of social status.
Although far more data have been gathered on non-middle-class blacks'
speech, what little has been gathered suggests that similar attitudes toward
middle-class values may ocur among non-middle-class whites. There is verbal
dueling, for instance, which deals wholly with taboo topics, including those
rarely if ever heard from blacks. As with black ritual insulting, what is said
in the dueling is not necessarily true. Rather, each person tries to build
upon a previous remark either by intrducing a taboo subject or by insulting
another person, preferably with his or er own words. Puns are not necessarily
a feature of such exchanges. The repartee can be between men and women and the
eniter subject matter of the discourse deals with subjects that are especially
taboo in middle-class speech. Although the topics are taboo, taboo words are
not necessarily used.

p. 228

A sample of such dialogue, gathered by a student, Cynthia Marousis, in
an urban coffee shop after midnight, started with a male customer's asking a
waitress if she was married. When she responded, "Yeah," he asked, "How's your
lover?" The assumption, pretended as much as real, that she was immoral enough
to have a lover started an entire sequence of exchanges about menstruation,
incontincence, oral sex, and homosexuality (not repeated here). The waitress
commented, "My husband's good, but my lover's not doing good. He's got the rag
on." This comment about her lover shows that the object is to raise a taboo
subject somehow. It makes no difference how absurd, impossible, or bizarre the
rejoinder is, just so long as the taboo subject is raised. Assuredly, such
exchanges are displays of verbal skill, especially one-upmanship. The topics
chosen indicated real hostility toward middle-class values.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Chaika continues in the rest of chapter 6 with ego-boosting and ritual
insulting.